Why is Public-Private Collaboration So Important in Disaster Risk Reduction?

Collaboration

By Peter Williams, Chairperson of ARISE-US

It's not unusual to encounter the assumption among business owners and managers (even of very large businesses) that disaster risk reduction (DRR) is "the city's job" or "the government's job". Nor is it unusual to find the opposite assumption, implied or explicit, in governments - "emergencies and disasters are our job". ARISE believes that any such thinking is a recipe for disaster - businesses and government need to hang together or, in the proverbial phrase, hang separately.

Why? Think for a moment about any community, from the smallest up to a major city. There are numerous "systems" that make the community up. Some systems are physical - energy, water, transportation, telecommunications. Some are service systems - healthcare, welfare, law and order, education. Some are social or political - religion, sporting events, community politics, the web of clubs and associations that may exist. And some are economic - business, taxation and so on. The community is the combination of all of these - a "system of systems" if you will.

The key point is that these systems all interact in different ways. This means that trying to reduce the disaster risk in any individual system without considering how it affects, and is affected by, the other systems will, at best, miss opportunities to improve DRR activities, and at worst it may undermine them.

So looking at the business-government relationship, if government fails to do its part, businesses will suffer from lack of information about risks and responses, loss of use of infrastructure, lack of access to emergency support, and loss of workforce through inability to get to work or the need to tend to their houses and families. The results - damage and expense, loss of production and potentially loss of customers if the customer base is in the same community.

Small businesses in particular are vulnerable to disasters because of their limited cashflows. Many disappear completely in the aftermath of a disaster, as we saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - the economy of New Orleans is still, 18 years later, smaller than it was before the event.

But the dependencies go the other ways as well. Government cannot "do it all". For one thing, many of the systems on which a community depends are owned by businesses - these businesses themselves have to ensure that the critical assets are appropriately hardened. Beyond that, businesses of all sizes need to make sure they have disaster response plans, and if possible they need to think of ways to help their workforces recover too. They need to ensure production facilities with dangerous processes cannot harm the community in the event of damage. They may be able to "help the government to help them" with skills and equipment when planning to mitigate a disaster or in the response, and by educating and mobilizing their workforces to think about or address risks in their area.

All this is quite apart from the need for general business services such as insurance, engineering and finance, that the community will need to draw upon to achieve the maximum disaster resilience that it can.

Only if the business-government relationship is working well will the economy of the community - the "beating heart" of the community's viability and vitality - be safeguarded from the impact of a disaster. This, in a nutshell, is why ARISE exists. Our mission is to have governments and businesses recognize their critical dependency on each other - and act upon it.